How will Metaverse revolutionise various industries in 2023 and beyond?

By offering interactive and immersive customer-connect opportunities, metaverse platforms are all set to change the very face of the way marketing and branding activities are carried out across the board. 

The Metaverse revolution is sweeping the world with investment in digitally connected projects reaching more than $120bn in the very first five months of 2022. In the entire year of 2021, the total investment the segment attracted was pegged at $57 billion. Going forward many experts predict that these digitally connected universes are bound to herald new revolutions across product categories and service domains. 

Metaverse uses a complex interplay of new-age technologies that include augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and artificial intelligence (AI) and is changing the very basic way we live, interact, and communicate with each other. Metaverse platforms are capable of replicating all our daily life activities in the virtual domain and lately, these are becoming instrumental in opening new avenues of opportunities for creators, influencers, and community builders among others.  Experts predict that 2023 will prove a game changer as metaverse platforms are all set to offer attractive opportunities for businesses across industries. Read on to find out how you too can leverage these amazing virtual worlds and multiply your business growth by establishing better connections with the target market:  

Reinventing customer connection:  Gartner's report predicts that in the future almost one-quarter of the world population will spend at least 60 minutes a day in the virtual worlds carrying out a range of activities. This means these platforms will become a hotspot of shopping and networking opportunities and offer brands a completely new way to connect with their prospective buyers. The holistic nature of metaverse worlds will also make sure that customers become part of the ecosystem and engage with brands in a more constructive and meaningful manner. This engaging conversation, in turn, will help in catalyzing innovations in various industries with inventors getting more insights into customers' needs to ideate novel products better aligned with their tastes and preferences.  

Transforming work experience with Virtual Offices: With remote working fast becoming a mainstay for the majority of organisations, metaverse can help companies to offer immersive ways to connect, communicate, and collaborate with employees for building an environment of trust and mutual respect. In the metaverse, firms can establish virtual offices, build interactive work environments, and let employees share their experiences from different locations to innovate new-age solutions. Further, virtual environments make these collaborative efforts more secure and also help to reduce the cost associated with the entire cycle of new product development. Clearly, with so many benefits on offer, organisations are sure to make a transition to the metaverse platforms for realising better connections and professional synchronicity with their team members. 

Training, Development, and Education: The grasping and learning capabilities of the trainees can be enhanced considerately using the metaverse platforms. In a study conducted by PwC, the use of VR can lead to four times and two times faster learning compared to learners in the classroom and online settings respectively. Companies can use metaverse platforms to impart both hard and soft skill training to their employees and the best part is that these platforms are highly cost-effective in nature. Further by effectively reskilling and upskilling their current crop of employees through metaverse platforms, the cost related to hiring the new set of employees can also be decreased considerably. 

3D Branding in Virtual Worlds: Companies can leverage immersive and encapsulating characteristics of the metaverse to take their branding efforts to the next level in the virtual world. The possibilities are infinite and the scope is tremendous as these platforms allow firms to offer personalized experiences to their target markets. The unveiling of new products can be planned in 3D virtual worlds, token-gated entries can be allowed for virtual concerts, and the entire virtual experience can be amplified with the help of AR videos, 3D photos, and surround-sound music capabilities. Moreover, companies can create digital avatars of their branding elements and can drop these into virtual marketplaces to add a healthy stream of revenue to their overall turnover. 

Metaverse comes with a huge potential to disrupt industries across the spectrum. For brands, the metaverse world offers a unique opportunity to engage with their target market in an interactive and immersive manner. However, these platforms are in their nascent stage of development and will continue to evolve in the future as more and more firms onboard this digital revolution. In order to capitalise on Metaverse in 2023 and beyond, organisations require a clear-cut strategy that must involve listening to the target market so that it'll lead to the delivery of superior customer experience through these digitally connected universes.